For better or worse Complaints about the best time of the year BY SAM PFEIFLE

With a nod to early fall, when the baseball season is wrapping up and the college and pro football seasons are just getting into swing, this is the best time of year for sports fans. March Madness, independent of all the stupid pools and bracketology, is sport at its finest, and spring training is the best of all the preseasons, the Florida sunshine filtering through our TV sets on Sunday afternoons as players we’ll soon see in Portland wear the big-league jerseys with high numbers. Pro hockey and basketball finally get interesting, and we’re lucky enough to be in Maine, where even college hockey is interesting (and the Pirates might be).

So why am I so bitter? Maybe I just need to vent.

Is there anybody else a little dissatisfied with the coverage of the tournament provided by CBS? They should do it much more like Sunday-afternoon football and regionalize their coverage. The first-round Vermont/UConn game had this town audibly buzzing (and my house was one divided — though I didn’t manage to acquire a baby-sized UVM T-shirt in time for the game). But how much of the game did we see here in Maine? Oh, about a quarter. That’s because, in the questionable logic of CBS, the Princeton/Texas game was ever so much more interesting.

Supposedly, it was more competitive. Yet the final scores reflected the exact same blowout — a 17-point margin of victory for both Texas and UConn. Why not show the more regionally interesting game? Who in New England cares at all about Princeton or Texas? Maybe a total of 10 people? Taylor Coppenrath, though he was frustrated by Emeka Okafor, was one of the great stories of the tournament, and yet we saw only 15 minutes, tops, of him playing.

Then there was round two. Did you notice which game was the default game on Saturday? Yep, it was Duke versus Seton Hall. Total and utter blowout, shown to the whole country, just because it was Duke. (And people wonder why so many people hate Duke.) Meanwhile, great games like Syracuse/Maryland and Stanford/Alabama and Gonzaga/Nevada were reduced to just their endings. And UConn, the only relevant game to the Northeast on Saturday? Yep, we got to see about a quarter of the game because North Carolina and Texas were playing at the same time. Yes, that was the better game, I’ll admit. But I still didn’t care. I wanted to see Okafor light up the crappy Blue Demons.

Either show the locally relevant games in their entirety or let other stations get in on the action and show all the games. Between the commercials and switching around to all the games, sometimes we’re seeing a minute of basketball for every two minutes of commercials.

Why isn’t anybody talking about the Bruins? They’re the third-best team in their conference, the best team in their division, they’re playing good hockey, in Joe Thorton they’ve got one of the top 20 players in the league, and in Patrice Bergeron they’ve got one of the top five rookies. So why doesn’t anybody care?

For Tuesday night’s game against the Ottawa Senators, an exciting team leading the league in goals scored and a very possible first-round playoff opponent for the Bruins, they got almost zero attention. The Press Herald? Their sports cover stories were Sea Dogs, Red Sox, girls NCAA, boys NCAA, surfer gal with shark bite, NBA Philly vs. Dallas, NHL Phoenix vs. Minnesota. And their "On TV Tonight"? George Mason vs. Oregon in an NIT game! The NIT? The battle to be the 65th best team in the country? Over Bruins/Ottawa on NESN? Are they on crack?

The Big Jab? Well, I didn’t listen to the entire four hours (hey Shoe and Fix: great job on extending to 10 a.m., by the way), but my 30-minute ride to work was almost totally Red Sox and Patriots. I’m excited about the Red Sox season, too, but is idle speculation about who the Sox will lock up before the season starts really more interesting than the Bruins’ chances in the playoffs? They’re battling to win their division — what more do people want from them?

Look, I know that the Pirates are a Caps affiliate, but the Caps suck, the Bruins are the closest thing Maine has to a pro team, and this is a great hockey state, already buzzing about UMaine’s wonderful team. And I know the Bruins have burned their fans on occasion recently (the first-round loss to the Canadiens hurt quite a bit), but haven’t the Red Sox burned us? Didn’t the Patriots suck for years upon years?

The Bruins play their next two closest rivals, in the Maple Leafs and Canadiens, this week. Let’s get on the bandwagon, people. They have a hot young netminder, too, in Andrew Raycroft. Who knows where he could take them?

Finally, I think it’s great that the Pirates are lowering ticket prices and doing other things to attract fans, but nothing puts fans in the seats like scoring goals and winning. The Pirates have a tough time doing both. They can talk about their good goaltending and how tight the league is right now all they want. That doesn’t negate the fact that they’re currently the third-worst team in their conference, and they’ve scored, by far, fewer goals than any other team in the league. Who wants to watch that? No wonder the Maineiacs are packing the Colisee in Lewiston.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at spfeifle@phx.com